The proposed research is designed to provide a systematic investigation of a spectrally-oriented tactual aid for profoundly-deaf listeners. Toward this goal, we have designed, built, and are now testing a multi-point electrotactile speech aid (MESA-I) that is worn on the abdomen. MESA-I is a 288-point stimulator (36 column x 8 rows) with frequency coded horizontally in space and amplitude coded vertically in space. The 36 frequency channels cover a range from 85Hz to 10,500 Hz. Our current data demonstate that, with training, vowels in a CVC context can be identified with near perfect accuracy, and the consonantal features of voicing and nasality, both of which are critical for deaf listeners, are well resolved. We propose to test this device on speech perception tasks as well as on basic psycho-physical tasks using synthetic signals that are relevant to speech perception and that can be compared to data obtained in the auditory domain.